The Bloody Preacher of a Dead God
by Ravenspear
Summary: In a small hospital in a village full of corpses, a man dies and a killer is born. Akabane origin!fic, with some Akabane/Ban.


**Title:** The Bloody Preacher of a Dead God  
**Characters/Pairing:** Akabane (some Akabane/Ban)  
**Rating:** R.  
**Word count:** 1300  
**Warning: **Batshit insanity and disturbing imagery. _Violence_.  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own it, and I make no money off it.  
**Notes:** Errr... For this fic to make even the slightest bit of sense, you have to assume that Akabane did charity work in one of the more dangerous parts of Africa before he went crazy and became Doctor Jackal.  
**Summary: **In a small hospital in a village full of corpses, a man dies and a killer is born. Akabane origin fic.

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His blood was pooling around him on the once-pristine white floor, going, going, gone; flowing from the hole they carved in his chest before leaving him alone in the small hospital with only the defiled and mutilated corpse of the girl-child he'd tried to protect for company.

Her eyes were still staring at him, lifeless and unseeing but still so very, very accusing. He hadn't been able to hide her, hadn't been able to save her, had been too weak, too weak, too weak to stop those panicked cries that still echoed in his head along with the metallic laughter of the guns and the terrified screams and pained moans of the dying. He'd apologized to her, whispering pleas for forgiveness until his throat would no longer produce any sound and his tongue and lips would no longer form words, but those words really didn't matter anymore, because she was dead, they were all dead, and he might as well be, since the puddle he was sitting in was steadily growing larger, already bathing her small ashen hand in red. He wanted to cry, but it hurt too much, so he laughed instead; a broken, rasping sound, pregnant with unshed tears and all-consuming despair.

And suddenly there was a gust of wind in the closed room and sour breath in his face and opening his eyes he found himself face to face with a woman who was a dog who was both a woman and a dog, and her blue eyes held both dancing amusement and dead gravity as she watched him slowly bleed away. She was unkempt and dirty, and smelled of sweat and blood and death and something he couldn't place that was sweet and sour and both disgusting and intoxicating at the same time, and she was so incredibly _beautiful_.

She spoke to him there, crouching in his blood, in a voice that carried the resonance of lunatic screams and psychotic apathy and rabid mania. She spoke of death and a grave that would stand empty and walking dead but alive as the bloody preacher of a dead god, and underneath it all was the unspoken promise of an end to the screams and the pain and the fear and those dead dread eyes. And what was he to do but sell her his soul and beg her for release?

He cried as she leaned in, harsh uncontrollable sobs and tears that would not cease, and the kiss they shared tasted like salt and that sour tang of madness that was her breath. And it was _glorious_. That gentle touch of her lips on his unmade him and remade him, made him numb and made him hunger, drove him deeper and deeper into the sea of red behind his eyelids and he thought that if this went on for much longer he might go too far and never come back again.

Then the pain in his chest – sharp, _good_ pain making his nerves explode in bursts of white light and burning cold – as she drove the two scalpels home brought him back and he screamed.

And he watched the scalpels melt into his skin, leaving two pink scars next to his mortal wound that was no more, and she told him they belonged to him now, that his blood made them his.

Then she kissed his forehead in a silent farewell, and got up to leave. That was when he noticed them; the jackals, sitting around him and staring, some growling, some whimpering, some twitching, some frothing at the mouth. They stared and he stared back, then they turned to follow their mistress, and he was alone again, but this time brown skin turning ashen and glassy eyes and anguished crying meant nothing to him, and he smiled as he stabbed the scalpels into his palms like a mockery of another son of a god and felt them lay themselves to rest inside of him, waiting for his command to rise from his flesh and tear something apart.

Dressed in bloody tatters he stepped out of the hospital into a red world, chasing the sun westwards out of the dead village where he had risen from the ashes of life and pain and sanity and become this new creature; strong, bloodstained and free.

And so he walked through a field of death of his own creation, where the only rain to fall was blood and the only crops the soil would yield were bones.

Around him they flew on wings of owls and falcons, flocking to him like vultures to their source of food, his bloody muses, the horrific and beautiful keres.

They would descend upon those who fell to his blades, gleefully screeching as they with tooth and talon tore the bodies asunder and devoured their souls. Then they would adorn themselves with gruesome trophies, dyeing their clothing with the blood of the fallen and decking their seductive bodies with jewelry and belts made from entrails and bones and eyes and whatever else that would strike their twisted fancy.

After their feasts, they would return to him, enveloping him with blood-spattered wings and pressing crimson kisses onto his face, and laughing he would drink the blood they offered him from the steaming cup of a still-beating heart.

In this fashion he cut a bloody swath across the land, fueled by screeching laughter, warm blood and the sense of ever-watching blue eyes, leaving nothing but death in his wake, for what could be days or weeks or months; he really didn't know, because there existed no time in this world where a white sun shone forever at it's zenith in the blood-red sky, and he didn't stop until his arms wouldn't rise at his command and his legs wouldn't move at all and he fell face-first into the red sand.

When he woke again, it was not in his world. The world he awoke to was not colored in varying shades of blood, and there were no screeching voices or blue eyes. This was the world he remembered from that dream-fuzzy time before he died, and he was so very acutely aware that he did not belong there.

He remembers, vaguely, two doctors in another small-town hospital, with their too-alive eyes and too-warm hands and too-not-red clothing, speaking about a horrific massacre at the hands of parties unknown, the devil's luck, severe exhaustion, dehydration and starvation, and he wondered how they could have failed to notice the blood – which was _not his_ – that covered him from head to toe, and the scalpels still resting in his body, waiting to be unleashed. That was before he was sent back to Japan, a home he remembered as nothing more than a series of images of places and people without any feelings attached.

He struggled to achieve that blood-red world again; took a name in the blue-eyed one's honor, took a job that would keep him entertained and supply him with opponents strong enough to test his newfound and ever-improving skills, and threw himself into bloody carnage with abandon and total disregard for his life; all to hear the echoes of bird-like voices and feel ghosts of kisses upon his face, and to maybe feel those eyes on him again.

Then, one day, he met _him_. The man who reeked of old blood and old death and madness, and who made the world go red and those voices come back full-force for just a little while. And there they were: _Her_ eyes looking at him from that new face.

And so when Ban one night asks "Why me?", Akabane kisses his shoulder with a smile on his face, breathes deep from that intoxicating scent that makes the world flash red, and answers: "Because you bring me closer to my god."

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Mythology notes:  
1.) The woman is the greek godess Lyssa, goddess of martial madness and rabies, often depicted with a dog's head on top of her human head and dressed like a kennel keeper.  
2.) The keres are the personifications of violent death in greek mythology, depicted as winged women.


End file.
